Pirate - Duncan Falconer [7]
‘This’ll do,’ he decided.
Hopper climbed out of the wadi and Stratton handed him the coil. Hopper crossed the track, placed it on the ground, removed two metal pins from the brutal-looking device and pushed them into holes in its sides. He removed his scarf, bundled it on to one of the pins and gently hammered the pin home with a rock. He repeated the process with the other pin until the device was held securely, and wrapped the scarf back around his neck. As he walked back across the track to rejoin Stratton in the wadi, he unwound a coil of steel wire, the final part of the installation.
Hopper pulled the wire just enough to make it taut, then he put a rock on it to keep it in position on the edge of the wadi.
‘We’re good to go,’ Stratton said and they both walked back to the track junction.
Stratton took a final item from the pack – a cardboard box – and opened it to expose half a dozen canisters, ring-pulls attached. They looked like smoke grenades but smaller. He handed three to Hopper. ‘The lead car will open their doors as soon as they stop,’ he said. ‘That’s the best time to pop them in.’
‘We found that smashing the windows and dropping them inside the vehicle was quicker,’ Hopper said.
‘What if the glass is armoured? They’ll lock the doors and you won’t get in.’
‘Unlikely, but I get your point.’
‘You take the rear vehicle and I’ll take the lead.’
‘Roger that. Good luck,’ Hopper said and he made his way back along the wadi to the cable, where he sat down and made himself comfortable.
Stratton sat back so that he could see the village, and stretched out his legs. He felt tired. The past few days had been long ones.
The operation had started in Washington DC three days earlier. He had flown in to attend a meeting of British and US special operations. Discussions about strategic alignments for Afghanistan and North Africa. It had finished with a global assessment of the Islamic offensive to date. Not surprisingly to Stratton, the Americans pegged Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea as focal points for future operations. Somalia had become a mess on just about every level and was threatening to get worse. The world’s centre for piracy and large-scale kidnappings was fast becoming a conduit for hard drugs and arms smuggling. And the ops guys talked about another, possibly greater concern: Somalia had begun to emerge as an operational front for international Islamic terrorism.
It wasn’t Stratton’s kind of meeting. All too hypothetical for him. But he hadn’t been able to avoid it. With his level of experience he was expected to contribute to alliance planning strategies that included British special forces. His fears of one day getting permanently dragged into the office, desk, operations administration system had gone up a notch. But luckily for him, on this occasion someone in London thought they needed him more than the Washington thinktank did.
As the second day of meetings came to an end, Stratton received a high-priority message to make his way to the British Embassy. Just him, no one else. Not the two SBS officers and the sergeant major from C Squadron he had arrived with. The message couldn’t have been clearer. The faint odour of an operation wafted through his nostrils. He couldn’t get out of the US Navy Intelligence offices quickly enough and grabbed a taxi to the other side of town.
On arrival at the embassy he was met by an aide. After brief formalities and security clearances, the aide walked Stratton up to the third floor, along cream-coloured corridors, and invited him to attend a private briefing inside the bubble chamber – the electronically sealed room designed to prevent eavesdropping. Stratton had been expecting several people to attend the brief. But he was mistaken. It was just him and the aide. The younger man, clearly from MI6, started talking. He was erudite, polished and intelligent.
Without the use of visual aids,